EPISODE 601: THE ICEMAN COMETH
I can't stop thinking that somewhere Eugene O'Neill is sticking pins in a doll shaped like me for using his title this way, and it delights me.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Five years ago, a kind of crazy thing happened in the world of comic books. Iceman, one of the original five X-Men, was revealed to be gay.
This was crazy for a bunch of reasons. First of all, this wasn’t your classic “Step to the mic and announce it to the world” scenario. Iceman – aka Bobby Drake -- didn’t tweet it out or post it in on his Tik Tok. In fact, he didn’t reveal it at all. He was confronted about it by—our second crazy thing--his younger self, who was now living in the present day along with all of the original X-Men, did I mention this was a comic book?
Actually it didn’t start with him either, but his telepathic teammate Jean Grey, who wasn’t even supposed to have her telepathic powers yet, but when you’re dragged 60 years into the future as a teenager it can do all kinds of crazy things to your standard superpower nervous system, and one of them is jumpstart your powers to such a degree suddenly you’re noticing that while three of your teammates are daydreaming about girls, the other is daydreaming about them.
And here’s the other thing that made the whole situation pretty darn strange—while Young Bobby was gay and knew it and wasn’t embarrassed about it, Adult Bobby, who they lived with, was dating a lady.
Was this some further sort of time travel parallel universe hijinks kind of a thing, you might ask, whereby what was true for Young Bobby wouldn’t necessarily be true for Adult Bobby because they were actually not the same person at two different points in their own timeline but two different versions of the same person? Certainly they themselves asked that question, until Young Bobby finally got up the nerve to ask his older self what exactly was the deal, at which point he learned that Adult Bobby was indeed gay, just very very much in the closet.
Now time and comic books is a funny thing. Adult Bobby had been around for 53 years at this point, and he had had just about enough adventures to match that kind of a length of a life. But the conventional wisdom in comics is that heroes shouldn’t grow old, because no kid wants to read a super hero book about their parents and their parents’ friends fighting robots, and so instead of actually being 53, he was supposed to be around 30.
Still, for those of us old enough to have been with him for most of his comic life, it felt like we’d just been told that one of the very first characters in a long-running story about people faced with persecution simply as a result of the fact of their genetics had spent the last 53 years living in the deepest shadows of another form of the same shame, and had done to such a degree that he’d never even in secret shared his feelings with anyone else, even his closest friends.
Which is a pretty devastating thing to discover about anyone you care about, and maybe moreso if they’re also as likeable as Bobby has always been. If you were writing up a list of loveable goofballs of the Marvel Universe, it would go Spider-Man, Deadpool, Iceman.
And yet, as soon as it all happened I found myself filled not with sadness but relief. Because I felt like in a way someone was telling a little bit of the story of me.
I had a piece published last week in the National Catholic Reporter about being a gay priest, and what that’s been like. It’s something I’ve been working on for a long time in one form or another, including in a lot of things I’ve nibbled around the edges of here.
(Btw: this has literally nothing to do with Bernie Sanders sitting in a throne made from the swords of his many victims. I just like it and also could not come up with a fun pop culture image that pairs well with “gay priest”. )
(But I do very much like the gloves.)
In the end you can’t include everything in an article. As it is the piece went from about 3500 words at its longest to 2100 at publication (and was much better for those cuts).
(Fun fact: My original title for the article was “Killing Mr. Data”. And while that didn’t end up fitting where the piece went, it is one of my favorite titles ever, and I hope someday I get to use it for something else. Maybe the Queer Clergy Punk Band I’m hoping to start if and when I hit 75.)
But there was one thing I wish I could have talked about more, and that’s how so much of my own growth and acceptance as a gay priest has come from pop culture. I grew up like most people of my time believing movies and television shows are fine, just fine--entertaining, if you like that sort of thing, but insignificant. It’s “the boob tube”. You want culture, go read a book.
But when I step back and look at the path of my actual life, pop culture has been just as important as any friendship or life experience in helping me not only to understand myself, but to see myself. When the world around you largely excludes people like you from representation, in fact makes your presence seem dangerous or wrong, you learn how to self-erase.
(I loved John Hughes growing up, still do, and I’m sure it’s because his early films were all about kids that felt like me, stringy, awkward looking, with braces and pimples and so much fear.
And yet not a single one of those kids was ever gay. I don’t blame Hughes for that, it was the 80s. Some have said read between the lines, it was all right there. But that wasn’t much help for kids who didn’t know there could be space between lines in the first place.)
When Catholics talk about “original sin”, I think what we mean is not “babies are dirty” (although, preach that too, sister), but “society is flawed and teaches us ways to be kept captive”. The Matrix is a pretty dated reference at this point, but this is exactly the jist of it – that we’re each of us living in a system that in some ways is not good for us and yet because we’ve grown up in it we not only can’t see the way that it’s a cage, we have been trained to help keep it going.
Remember how the villains in The Matrix could hop into any person? Did you ever wonder, why was that? How was it possible that they could do that?
My take, it’s because in being formed by the world about who and what is right or wrong or real, we’ve all been built with a “back door” that the world uses to maintain itself. Kids aren’t born prejudiced, but anyone who has ever had a bad experience on a playground can tell you #!%! can get pretty real pretty young.
For me pop culture has proven to be the hack in the system, the one place where I was able to be reached no matter what the rules I had learned. Pop culture is like when a new kid from somewhere else joins your class and starts asking questions about things nobody else ever even noticed. Why do the desks face this way? Why are you talking like that? Why is it wrong for me to ask these questions?
Just by being themselves, they reveal that there’s more to consider than we knew. If I can Catholic for a second–yes, I’m verbing Catholic, you know you love it—that’s kind of my take on Jesus. He was basically the kid that moved from another school. That’s what made him exciting and revelatory.
It’s also why they had to kill him. The person that sees different shows that the system is arbitrary and could be different, too. And the system don’t like that.
Don’t get me wrong, pop culture can be garbage, too, and reinforce all the wrong things. It often does. I watched a new film this weekend about cops secretly breaking the law and killing people and getting away with it, which is really whole genre of cop films, and not one I probably considered too directly before the last year. But I think it’s pretty clear at this point, that is not a story we need more of. Stories like that reaffirm a lot of things that have done a lot of harm.
But for me, my whole life there have been stories that snuck up on me, usually because that was the only way to reach me, and showed me that I could have more in my life. Not just that I was gay – I figured out that slower than many but still quite a long time ago at this point – but that it was okay, and that there was room for more in me and for me that just acknowledging my identity with my friends.
(My mind immediately goes to David Fisher, the closeted gay undertaker on Six Feet Under. That show did so much for me. It was the first time I ever watched the ongoing story of a gay character, and one struggling with the question of becoming more open in his life.
I also think immediately of the work of American musical composer Stephen Sondheim, but if I get started talking about him we’ll be here until we’ve all been vaccinated (which in California seems like 2022 at the earliest, it’s fine, we’re fine, sometimes I just like to sit and rock myself for hours like this).
Suffice to say, when God really needs to speak to me, he needle drops Sondheim.)
I’ve been doing this newsletter for about five years. And I’ve always understood it as a way of chewing on the intersection between pop culture and spirituality. Sometimes it’s just me talking about life or gushing about things I’ve seen or sharing links. But underneath I think the reason I keep doing it is that for me pop culture is a means of liberation. Whether we’re talking SNL sketches, the latest high-falootin’ Scorsese picture or my niece Ally’s TikToks, it doesn’t matter. It’s great and I celebrate it and I want to hear about it and share it if it helps us all be a little bit more free.
If you’re new to the newsletter, that’s what I’m up to. And if you’ve been around a while, that’s what I often fail at but am trying to do. That, and maybe to be a little campfire in the dark where we can all sit and tell stories and eat s’mores and not feel alone.
Every year I take around a month after Christmas to just sort of decompress. Usually things are not quite so…eventful? Is that the word? in January.
I feel like anything I could say has already been said on it all, and also, to much of it, good riddance. But there is one thing I wrote that I am really proud of, both because I felt like I might have actually had something of use to say, and because my editors at Fordham let me be funny. I cannot emphasize enough how happy I was for that.
As a way to sing us out today, here are five things that might have gone under your radar in the last crazy month that absolutely fit the bill for me of bringing together pop culture, freedom and joy.
Jam Sesh with the Bae
My sister and her family got me a Baby Yoda for Christmas. It’s the most incredibly realistic toy that I have ever received, and also I’m pretty sure it’s actually alive and oh god I can feel it staring at me right now.
The BBC Gettin’ Jiggy
Believe it or not, this was shot in 2019, I assume by the oracle Cassandra, who knew that come 2020 we would absolutely need it.
My New Aerobics Routine, Apparently
I am literally so taken with this video I actually want to learn the dance. Which is obviously weird. Where exactly would I perform it?
Stay tuned, I guess?
Mr. Tamborine Man
I’m pretty sure I posted this before Christmas, but I’m giving it to you again, not only because it seems to be hitting all the notes of our sixth season inaugural episode here but because that moment around 2:30 where Andrew Rannells and company start dancing with tamborines continues to leave me transfixed.
They jump in rhythm WHILE they slap tamborines, you guys! It’s amazing!
Clearly, I am in need of some serious dancing right now. Please pray for the guy who lives below me.
Lastly and most recently, I leave you with a moment from one of my comedy heroes, Bob Mortimer. There’s a lot of great comedians, but for me no one lightens the load and makes the world feel okay and silly like Bob Mortimer does. He’s the whole world’s fun uncle and I love him.
I’ll be back next week with more hootenanny. In the meantime, look after yourself. If you can, give yourself permission to do something just for the sheer pleasure of it. We’re all probably a lot hungrier and thirstier for joy than we might realize. And it often doesn’t take much to mean a lot.